Honeysuckle
by Cail M
Summary: Hermione doesn't think that her brush with girlish romance was 'wholesome', but somehow she can still remember every detail. Slash.


  
  
  
Summary: Hermione doesn't think that her first brush with physical attatchment was 'wholesome', but she can still remember every detail. Slash.  
Disclaimer: Hermione, Ginny, Harry, Ron, the twins, Molly, Arthur and even his camera all belong to J.K. Rowling and I'm only using them for pleasure, no profit.  
Warning: This story contains slash and het referances and several movie-grade steamy kisses.  
  
  
**Honeysuckle**   
  
  
The picture is of two little girls sitting beneath a bower of honeysuckle-their white picnic blanket rumpled and unkempt, one corner draped over the red-head's shoulder, a smudge of chocolate on her cheek, the other, hands propping her up, grinning away from the camera and straight at the other girl. Or perhaps I shouldn't say straight. It was rather more complicated than that.   
  
But pictures don't tell stories, they only tell moments in time, and as Arthur Weasley turned and waved at the girls he took one last snapshot.   
  
I still have that picture; it is tucked in a flat frame and stuffed in some dark drawer. I couldn't possibly hang it in my living room or the study; there is too much subtext there for me to endure looking at it all the time. I don't like to be reminded of some things.   
  
It was spring. It felt like it would never be anything but spring, but summer always follows, chasing off the chilly nights and the first golden warm mornings become monotonous. But it was spring and the flowers were starting to bloom. It was Ginny's birthday and I was staying at the Burrow, a hole full of Weasleys.   
  
There were a lot of repressed desires that resurfaced during that summer trip. I'm sure it all had something to do with being an only child and the sudden exposure to her happy crowded family must have pushed me over the edge. I would never have misbehaved under normal circumstances. I was always a good girl.   
  
When I was much younger, all I wanted was a little brother. For his birthday I would cover his eyes and lead him into the kitchen and it would be full of balloons and his big chocolate birthday cake. I would make it for him, and I would clean up the mess. I wrote letters to Santa requesting a baby brother, but I put them in the mailbox by myself, so my parents had no way of knowing my secret desire.   
  
Silly wishes aside, I was learning to cook birthday cake that crowded week. Mrs. Weasley showed me and let me whip the cream all by myself, warned me that I could use my whisk as a weapon to keep everyone's fingers out of it, there was just enough to top the cake. When we had iced the cake, covering all the chocolate with a fluffy layer of snow-white cream, Mrs. Weasley wrote 'Virginia' on top with pink dye. When she put it on the table in front of Ginny there were so many sparkling little candles that the cream almost melted before she could blow them all out.   
  
Her eyes gleamed with the light of all those candles before she blew them out and she was laughing louder than usual, but she took her deep breathe and seriously blew out all the candle. I wonder if her wish came true. She ate her cake in tiny half-forkfuls, taking it all in slowly. She glowed. She radiated. I know what she was feeding off of, the novelty flavor of being the center of attention.   
  
Though she was the youngest, and even then a decade and a half, Ginny sat quietly and merely watched her brothers buzz each other and race around the meadow, tripping and sprawling, pouncing on each other as if the sport they were playing had only one rule-full-contact. Someone cried out-George I think-"Broomstick tag!" And Molly warned that it was getting too dark. But I knew they would manage to stay out until long after dark, even if it meant someone had to stay on the ground and hold up a lantern so they would all see to chase each other.   
  
Calling the twins back and giving them strict instructions to carefully deposit the picnic hamper in the kitchen and set the dishes to soaking, Molly wandered off from the picnic ground a little way ahead of Arthur, grinning after her boys, because for this one week Harry is just the black-haired son that she never had.   
  
Arthur followed at a slower pace, looking over his shoulder, a bemused expression on his face. He was coming to terms with the fact that all of his children were over half-grown, it must have been a befuddling notion. He lifted the gleaming glass eye of his antique camera and caught us as I wish we could remain. In that last moment we are innocent, or at least I like to think I had no idea what I was about to do.   
  
Our picnic had been spread beneath a honeysuckle bower growing in showers over an old fence. There were flattened patches of grass where everyone had been sitting but other then that the red and white tablecloth was the only sign that there had just been a party there.   
  
If I were six years old I might have been able to appreciate it when Ginny showed me how to extract the drop of sweetness from the inside of the honeysuckle flowers but I knew too much about botany to feel entirely comfortable with the idea of doing that to the flower.   
  
She sat on the tablecloth with her legs crossed, she had taken off her socks and was running her toes through the fresh grass, her head is thrown back and her hair tangled down her back. If I kissed her she would taste like honeysuckle.   
  
She opened her eyes and saw me staring. "Oh, Hermione, I love my birthday." She hugged her arms around herself, thankful to have been born. "It's better than all the other good days put together. I'm glad you could be here this year."   
  
I touched my mouth, making an effort to swallow several times until I could be sure of my voice. "Should we go back?"   
  
She crawled across the blanket toward me and put her head to my shoulder, a gesture I had seen her use on her mother, affectionate, but still treating me like a pillow.   
  
I kissed her temple without thinking, her hair was silky soft and her skin is warmer than the failing sunlight. Goosebumps rose on my arms and the hair on the back of my neck was standing on end. It was like being afraid.   
  
"Ginny…"   
  
"We don't have to be back. It's not dark yet."   
  
"But it's getting cold." I pulled back defensively, but I had to catch her head so that it didn't fall and crack on the ground. She lay there in my arms, cradled. "You must be cold, you don't have your socks on." My voice sounded slow like honey in winter.   
  
I was staring at her naked knee and the hem of her skirt that rucked up and tangled in her lap.   
  
"I love spring nighttime…." She shivered in my arms, but for show, not for cold.   
  
"You want it to last longer."   
  
"Of course. It's my day, I'm queen, and I want it to go on as long as it possibly can. Even when you're my only subject."   
  
I could feel the goose bumps spreading under my clothes.   
  
I touched her cheek then bent close until my nose bumped hers and made me stop. I opened my mouth, but instead of telling her a whispered secret-had that been my intention?-I dropped my mouth to cover her lips.   
  
I had been expecting strawberries, raspberries, fruit of girlish sweetness, but her breath was hot and musky, her mouth was soft and moist like the chocolate cake but full of little biting teeth to catch my lips and nibble at me like a one of those rock sucking fish gathering a pebble into its mouth and chewing all the algae off before spitting it out.   
  
She pushed me back struggled until she sat up. I covered my mouth with my hands, terrified that I had ruined her. She was made of chocolate and whipped cream and sugar and marshmallow and she ran like ice-cream and I had ruined it by melting her. I should have just blown out and made a wish that never came true.   
  
She pushed a hand into my chest, palm to sternum, clinical, nothing to do with breasts and the rosette buds of nipples, I thought it was to push me away but as I shifted backwards I found that her pushing was to pin me. I gave a few weak butterfly flaps but she was busy, scrambling to lie half on and half beside me, pressed tight as a limpet to a rock. If the limpet were warm and the rock were warm.   
  
She scrabbled against me like a warm kitten, pressing her face in between my chin and my collar, giving one little kiss that felt like, 'No', even as the weight of her leaning head felt like 'Yes'. I held my breath until she kissed my neck again. Two kisses must have meant yes.   
  
I didn't know what I wanted, or she wanted but I could tell that we were burning up with awkward little flashes of feelings we weren't used to.   
  
In some ways I know I was just trying something new to see if it fit, does it look allright, will I be able to just put it in the wash without ruining it?   
  
I notched two fingertips against the indentation of her clavicle and she drew my sweater over my head which made my hair full of static electricity. I shocked her when we touched lips the nest time. She plays with my white buttons, undoing half of them and pushing her hands over my naked shoulders.   
  
She makes me want to shut my eyes, her lips part and she sucks my tongue into her mouth, she bites down as if to trap me there with her forever. No one has ever touched my shoulder blades like that.   
  
Finally, when it was too dark and cold to think of staying further we untangled. My French braid had fallen down, my mouth felt cold without her lips.   
  
All the walk home I could not imagine ever wanting to touch a boy after having my hands full of Ginny. That sounds lewd, as if we danced naked and fingered and did more than we did, but I wrapped my arms around and with one hand over each shoulder she filled me.   
  
All the way back to the Burrow I wondered if kissing rots the teeth when it is so sweet that it aches.   
  
We did more than that. If your interest lies in the direction of prurient speculation, don't, because we did, but it wasn't anything groundbreaking. It amuses me to think that when it was new to us I felt as though I was discovering a whole secret world that no one else could possibly know about.   
  
It got harder at school, every time we found an empty corridor together or a dark corner in between class and studies I kept remembering that she was my best friend's little sister.   
  
I hate to admit this part of it, but she was also my first boyfriend's little sister. I don't like admitting it because it makes it seem like I had been searching for something that I didn't find in Ginny. But she was better than a brief discovery, she can be a memory of all my first. Not an entirely wholesome memory. But I like to think that it made sense at the time.   
  
Except for those few moments I remember best she wasn't mine and I certainly wasn't hers.   
  
It isn't the sort of thing I have ever told people, not even friends, because the one person I did tell was shocked and horrified and I thought he would be far more understanding.   
  
"You were always like sisters!" Harry said.   
  
The funny thing is that we were.   
  



End file.
